UPCI Scandals: Sleepovers with Uncle Jeff

Scandals involving pastors are nothing new for the United Pentecostal Church International. Listing only the ones that resulted in arrests or lawsuits within the past five years still produces a remarkable litany of appalling abuses and scandals:

• In 2003, Rev. Ronald Oree Nation, a twenty-year official at the national UPCI headquarters, was arrested for engaging in sexual acts with other men in a public park.
• The same year, Rev. James Manning was sued for long-standing sexual abuse of a parishioner.
• In 2005, a lawsuit against Apostolic Faith Church in Wisconsin alleged that Pastor James Schumacher knowingly permitted a child molester to teach Sunday School, and, when two girls were sexually assaulted in the church basement, threatened to excommunicate their parents if they notified the authorities.
• In 2006, Rev. Richard Lawson was accused by four women of making unwanted sexual advances. Another leader at the same church had already recently faced charges of having an inappropriate relationship with an underage girl.
• This year, Rev. David Thompson was accused of stealing nearly a million dollars from a UPCI church that he pastored in Ohio
• Also this year, Rev. Roy Curtis Huling was arrested for molesting a young girl who attended his church.

These are only a few of the scandals that gained national attention and resulted in arrests or lawsuits. With a low reporting rate for sexual assault and with many lesser crimes being ignored, I believe we can safely assume that the problem is much more widespread. When scandals do come to light, many times the twisted dynamic that permitted these heinous events to flourish in a church (usually for years before the scandal breaks) is ignored by reporters who assume that these are aberrant occurrences foisted upon unsuspecting and shocked churches.

Craig Malisow of the Houston Press is a rare exception. In his investigation of yet another UPCI scandal, he uncovered not only long-term molestation of several girls by a prominent church member, but also the intimidation, favoritism, greed, and prejudice against women that kept the molestation a secret for so many years and ended ultimately in the excommunication of the families of the girls from the church. Those of us who have lived these horrors find the events described all too familiar. Our stories may vary in detail, but the substance is the same--pastors drunk on power and lacking any meaningful accountability, meetings where people are humiliated or threatened in front of everyone, victims slandered and shunned.

Malisow's article Sleepovers with Uncle Jeff is well worth reading. I hope that it may help non-Pentecostals who read it to understand better the troubling cultish atmosphere that produces such scandals. These events do not occur in a vacuum, but are the product of an atmosphere where charisma counts for more than godliness and money matters more than righteousness.

To read Sleepovers with Uncle Jeff, click the links below:

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